Nature’s charitable amnesia

I often surprise myself by awaiting [Sigrid’s] return, and if I survive, the summer will be difficult without flowers, bouquets, even minuscule ones in the old ink bottles, and the silent strolls in the woods, when she would point out the flowers visible only to the eye of a small child. Steinberg spent Thanksgiving Day, the only holiday he truly enjoyed, all alone in Springs, avoiding the “rich, noisy invitations” he was offered. He thought of years past, when he would take his own wine to spare himself “the local Beaujolais” at the houses of friends—James and Charlotte Brooks, Muriel Murphy, Jean Stafford—“almost all of them gone” now. He was content to be alone in his warm house and, thanks to his medications, was in one of his better moods on the dreary November day when the postman delivered a dead leaf sent without an envelope but with stamps affixed directly to it, as well as the address in Sigrid’s hand, mailed from Key West the last time they were there.

Sigrid had risen from her depression long enough to indulge in Steinberg’s little game of sending amusing objects through the mail without envelopes, just to see if they would be delivered. He once sent a dollar bill to himself, writing the address and affixing stamps directly onto the money, but that time the postman spoiled his fun by putting it into a glassine envelope. Now, several months after Sigrid’s death, he was confronted by her leaf, which provoked one of his recurring bouts of “profound sadness, and then, luckily, they pass, nature’s charitable amnesia.”

He had had two rough months since Sigrid died. Often she came to him in dreams that left him lying awake and yearning for interpretation. By spending his days puzzling over them he became ensnared in morbid depression, forcing himself briefly out of it by accepting dinner invitations. His friends were delighted to see him but discomfited by his unusual silence; he was so afraid that he might break down in mid-monologue if he assumed his usual role of commanding raconteur that he thought it “prudent” to listen rather than talk. “But where, then,” he asked himself, “is the enjoyment?” He could not help but think of Sigrid, whose behavior he now praised as “honorable” as she refused to participate in what she had called social contracts requiring three hours of good behavior.

He was generally careful about which invitations he accepted and did not venture outside his comfort zone. Mary Frank was aware of his “tremendous fear of dirt and the smells of sickness” and invited him only for quiet suppers with herself, her husband, Leo Treitler, and occasionally another guest whom Steinberg knew and trusted, often their mutual friend Mimi Gross. Before Steinberg accepted Frank’s first invitation after Sigrid’s death, he warned her that he was depressed and had been on antidepressants for quite a long time and that none of his various medications seemed to be working. At a loss for how to comfort him, she said she admired his “tremendous will” and hoped that yoga and meditation would help. Later she did not remember whether he replied, only that he was exceptionally quiet when they were together.

He liked Jean Stein’s dinner parties, where she always had a table of eight or ten interesting conversationalists and seated him next to her husband, Dr. Torsten Wiesel, a good friend who offered soothing medical counsel through casual and informal conversation. Steinberg also liked the small dinners Barbara Epstein gave, often for visiting European writers who brought the latest cultural news about many of his favorite places and friends. He met the exiled Romanian writer Norman Manea there, and in the beginning was “not thrilled to meet another Romanian.” As the other guests vied to ask Manea about the political situation for Romanian writers, a quiet but also “sardonic and taciturn” Steinberg interrupted his reply with abrupt new questions: “How can anyone be a Romanian writer? Is there such a thing as Romanian literature?” These shut down conversation as all shocked eyes turned to Manea to await his answer. Perhaps because he did not know of Steinberg’s reputation for acidly demolishing dinner companions, Manea became one of the few who survived and even surmounted the barbs Steinberg routinely tossed when he wanted center stage. He shot back with “When did you leave Romania?” When Steinberg confessed it was a good sixty years before, Manea expounded at length on Romanian intellectuals who had gone on to make international reputations, among them Steinberg’s friends Eugène Ionesco and Emile Cioran. “Maybe, maybe,” Steinberg answered grudgingly, admitting that he was “not up to date on Romania.”

At first the friendship was “tentative,” but as Steinberg learned that Manea was “an Austrian Romanian Jew, more refined than the usual Turkish Jews like me,” he seized the opportunity to recall and revisit his personal Romanian history. Every time Norman and his wife, Cella, told him they were planning a trip to Bucharest, Steinberg gave them detailed instructions about where to go for the historical postcards he wanted them to buy, particularly anything associated with Buzău. Steinberg may have called Romanian the language of police and thugs, but it still fascinated him. He had an enormous Romanian dictionary and would often telephone the Manea household to tell them of a word that struck his fancy or to ask their interpretation of a particular phrase or expression. Occasionally he hinted that he might like to accompany them on one of their visits to Romania, but if they invited him to join them, he always refused to make “an impossible return.” He told them what he had told Christo several decades earlier, that it was better to retain one’s memories in the mind than to revisit them in person.

However, no matter where Steinberg’s conversations with Norman Manea began, they always became a diatribe about the plight of having been born a Jew in a hostile country. Steinberg ranted about authority, but Manea thought his primary obsession was “really nostalgia, for his family and for the language.” Whenever they argued about the worth and value of Romanian literature, Manea offered to let Steinberg read Romanian editions of writers who were currently popular, but he always refused. Manea decided that Steinberg was not interested in the country’s present or future; his only interest was nostalgia, which he expressed through a combination of melancholy and fury that had not softened during sixty years of self-imposed exile, a combination of “rage and magical feeling.”

The magical feeling was for the boyhood neighborhood that was no longer there, most of the buildings having been razed by the ravages of war or the grandiose building projects of the Ceaus¸escu government. Steinberg yearned for the people he knew, the old shops in the old streets, and “particularly the smells,” which he recalled with precision and tenderness time and time again. To Steinberg’s immense delight, Prudence found a large-scale prewar map of Bucharest in the New York Public Library, and he spent happy hours making photocopies in various sizes for his friends, retracing his daily route from his house to his school and his walks to the homes of his aunts and the shops of his uncles.

“I’m passing my days walking those streets that don’t exist anymore,” he told Henri Cartier-Bresson. “My childhood lasted a long time, very intense. I recorded everything and now walking through the map of my childhood streets I see things consciously for the first time as if my mind has recorded everything and certain images are developed and printed only now after eighty years.” He also sent a copy of the map to the Maneas, with a note explaining his various peregrinations through the city. Although it began “ Dragii mei ” (dear friends) and ended “ Cu drag ” (affectionately), he wrote the body of the note in English, the salutation and the sign-off being the only words he ever wrote in their native language.

As Steinberg’s friendship with Norman Manea deepened, another reason surfaced for his refusal to speak Romanian: his vocabulary remained that of an unsophisticated schoolboy, and he did not want to put himself in a position where he could be corrected or embarrassed. Instead he chose to feel sorry for Manea, “the poor guy, obliged to write in the despised Romanian and have his work translated.” He sternly demanded that both Norman and Cella speak only English, for how else would they learn their new language? Although he could be scathing about current American politics and culture, he told them that he considered himself profoundly and deeply American and they must “never be frightened or ashamed” of being American themselves.

PRUDENCE ASKED STEINBERG TO JOIN HER for a Key West holiday in January, the first winter after Sigrid’s death, but he declined. As she knew he had been there before with Sigrid, she thought he might be reluctant to return and did not press him to change his mind. Shortly after Prudence invited him, he received the news that Ada had died quietly on January 16, 1997, in her well-appointed rooms at the Casa Prina nursing home, felled by the various heart problems she had suffered for quite a few years. Her death was not a total surprise, for Saul telephoned her almost every time he spoke to Aldo, and as was her way, she chatted effusively and left out no details of her ailments and illnesses. He knew they were serious, but her death so soon after Sigrid’s was still a terrible blow.

Prudence left for Key West on January 22, and by the twenty-ninth Saul had changed his mind and flew down to join her. She had rented Alison Lurie’s house and cottage, two separate dwellings that were connected by a patio where a large kapok tree grew. Steinberg liked the tree so much he drew it several times, writing on one, “This tree looks too much like art.” He stayed in the cottage, where he could have as much privacy as he wanted, and after Prudence returned to New York and her work as a copy editor at BusinessWeek magazine, he moved into the house to stay for two more weeks.

Key West was exactly what Steinberg needed, and from the moment he arrived, “he became as happy as a child, as if a miracle had happened, the sentence was lifted, and he had stepped clean away from his catastrophe.” He liked everything about the town, especially the new friends, among them the writers Harry Matthews, Robert Stone, and Ann Beattie. William Gaddis was there with his son, Matthew, and he saw them often. He and Prudence had lunch with someone Steinberg had always liked, Charles Addams’s ex-wife, Barbara, who had subsequently married John Hersey. She took them to visit Shel Silverstein, the children’s book author and illustrator who had long admired Steinberg.

What he loved most about the small town was the “strangeness more than anything else,” which helped him to forget “almost everything.” The tiny wooden houses that he passed on his mile-and-a-half morning walk to pick up the newspaper fascinated him, as did the famous writers and other celebrities who cherished their privacy during the day and came out only long enough to be convivial at night. He thought he was exceptionally lucky to have Prudence with him, as she enjoyed experimenting with the local food and could whip up dinner for six on the spur of the moment. He told Aldo that having her there was “a blessing I regard with feigned indifference.” And he told Prudence that they should plan ahead to rent Alison Lurie’s house again the next winter and that he wanted to invite Aldo and Bianca to join them, but in a separate house he would rent for them.

HE WAS IN A MORE BUOYANT MOOD in Key West than he had been in since Sigrid’s death, but as March ended and the return to New York loomed, what he was now calling “the tragedy” sprang to the forefront of his mind, and he dreaded returning to the familiar places where he had been with her. The first onerous task was to persuade the crematorium to accept his check as payment, for the law stated that only Sigrid’s heirs, her sister and Dr. Wanner, could authorize and pay for cremation. Eventually he prevailed. When he went to Springs and visited the grave site, he found it covered with green moss. He asked Gordon Pulis to construct a small fence to enclose it, and as soon as the weather permitted, although he had never shown much interest in gardening, he planned to plant her favorite flowers. He never did it, for he was so mired in depression that he was seriously considering suicide.

The long downward spiral began just after he returned from Key West and found himself crying over Sigrid day and night. He was afraid to see people during the day for fear he would burst into tears, and at night his dreams were so disturbing that he was afraid to let himself fall asleep. When he finally did, his rest was fitful and he awakened frightened and anxious, lying tightly curled in bed; if he slept until the morning light, he was afraid to open his eyes and face the day.

Searching for some explanation for his depression, he immersed himself in rereading the novels of Thomas Bernhard, looking for comparisons between Bernhard’s relentlessly negative prose and the rambling, disjointed, and disconnected ideas that swirled in his own head, all of which he was powerless to organize, let alone control. Steinberg invented other tenuous correspondences between himself and Bernhard: that the writer’s death at the age of sixty was also a suicide, as Sigrid’s had been at the same age, and that many of Bernhard’s women characters expressly mirrored her troubled existence. Such vague connections led Steinberg to conclude that if he had been a writer rather than an artist, Bernhard was the author to whom he would most likely be compared. Once again, as he had done when he read the novels for the first time, he found similarities between Bernhard’s fiction and Gaddis’s, which he then extrapolated to the personalities of Gaddis and himself. Their earlier rupture had been mended in Key West, and on the eve of his departure for Germany, Gaddis came to Steinberg’s house to say goodbye. After he left, Steinberg noted how Gaddis could not express the deep affection he felt for him, just as he, Steinberg, could never tell others how much he cared for them. It was a depressing reunion, as Gaddis was visibly ill; his emphysema was now in its endgame, and the symptoms of the prostate cancer that actually killed him a year later were barely manageable. Steinberg shuddered at how closely Gaddis resembled far too many of Bernhard’s ill and dying characters.

STEINBERG LOOKED FOR DISTRACTIONS FROM THE illness and death that surrounded him by focusing on his Romanian years. He was always searching for new ways to inhabit his past, and this time he found them by reaching out to classmates from the Lycée Basarab and the University of Bucharest with whom he had had little or no contact since he had left for Milan. He went to see Bruno Leventer, who lived near him on Park Avenue, which made visiting easy and also let him make a quick exit using the pretext of another appointment. Leventer had had a stroke several years previously and could not speak, so Steinberg had to carry the conversation, which, in his depression, was too exhausting to keep up for long. When he learned that a casual friend, Eddi Fronescu, had retired as a physician in Los Angeles, he telephoned often—after he discovered that he reveled in having to speak Romanian because the man was almost deaf and could only hear his native language. At first Steinberg made excuses for speaking Romanian, but he found that he rather enjoyed it, and it was the same when he wrote in Romanian to Eugene Campus in Israel, inventing as the excuse for using his native language that he could not write in Hebrew or Yiddish.

Pursuing all things Romanian could not occupy his mind completely, nor could such self-appointed tasks as making major repairs and repainting Sigrid’s cabin. Just as suddenly as he started, he decided not to do it and turned instead to other projects, which he became too exhausted to finish. Even writing letters took too much effort, and he abandoned one to Aldo after three sentences, with the excuse that he had to telephone Hedda for another of the rambling conversations in which she tried everything she could to boost his spirits. Although he thought himself powerless to control or change his moods, he was a shrewd observer of the effect they had on others; he noted how what he was calling by another euphemism, his “friendship” with Hedda, was really a dependency that grew and strengthened every time they talked. He decided that the friendship stemmed from her unconditional love, which made him ashamed, embarrassed, and often sobbing over how much he needed it and how unworthy and undeserving he was.

His letters to Aldo were less frequent now because he picked up the telephone whenever he felt the urge to unburden himself, often through sobs and tears. The phone calls worried Aldo more than the depressing and repetitive letters, and in an effort to cut through Steinberg’s haze of depression, he made him promise repeatedly not to phone unless he had something positive to say, and also to promise that he would be careful not to repeat himself time and again when he wrote—both to little avail. In one worrisome letter, Steinberg said that he was writing only to exercise his mind, as he had nothing to offer except continuing affection; he apologized for wallowing in self-pity on the telephone and promised to restrain himself in the future. His intentions were good, but he could not live up to them.

He became obsessed with Sigrid’s suicide note and, almost as if he needed to justify to himself that he bore no blame for her action, made photocopies and sent them to Aldo and many other friends, sometimes more than once. Aldo’s and Sigrid’s birthdays were one day apart, she on August 9, he on August 10. Even though the better part of a year had passed, Steinberg commemorated both anniversaries by crying to Aldo in a phone call and writing in a letter how he still missed her every minute.

JUST WHEN HE SEEMED THE MOST DOWN, he became the most up he had been since Key West. He told Prudence to go forward with reserving two houses there for the following winter, Alison Lurie’s for him and her, another for Aldo and Bianca. Even though he had not driven for the past several years, he decided that his old Chevrolet was becoming too dangerous to drive, and on Gaddis’s recommendation he bought a Volvo. He was also making plans for new books, new exhibitions, and even new friendships. He expressed regret that he had not reached out over the years to the many interesting people he had met at the dinner tables of others, and he regretted even more that he had always been a guest and never a host. He decided to give dinner parties of his own, but his teeth prevented him from doing anything immediately, and like many other good intentions, this one also drifted away.

So much that he did in his daily life became an homage to Sigrid, as he made litanies of her qualities and virtues that he had not sufficiently appreciated when she was alive. Preparing meals became a tribute to her as he made a fetish of seasoning his foods with the perennial herbs she had planted years before, convinced that they continued to grow so lavishly because it was her way of sending him greetings. By the autumn he was having such troubling dreams about her that he refused to describe them even to Aldo. Instead he compiled and mailed more lists of the flowers and herbs Sigrid had planted and then recited them on the phone to Hedda. Hedda and Aldo both worried when he described how he had awakened smiling from a nap because Sigrid was there and she invited him to take a walk in the woods with her and Papoose; he told them not to worry but to be serene, because Prudence had assumed all responsibilities for his care and there was very little he had to do except sit, sleep, and dream. He pretended to complain, but he was content to be relieved of the responsibilities for his daily well-being. Prudence worked in New York during the week, and when she went to Springs on the weekends to care for him, he was always filled with hope that “maybe the terror will disappear.” Unfortunately, it never did.

For more than a month at the end of 1997, Steinberg was physically incapacitated by depression, unable even to write to Aldo or pick up the phone and call him. Like one of his favorite fictional characters, Goncharov’s Oblomov, what he liked best was to pull the covers up over his head and let his still excellent memory revive past regrets and painful memories, because each time he did, he remembered something he had not been aware of at the time he had lived it. If friends who were not in his intimate circle wanted to visit, he put them off, saying that he was working and needed to be alone to concentrate for whole days at a time, but in reality he was afraid he would break down and cry in front of them. Just as he sometimes thought Sigrid was there with him, he thought Papoose was still alive and once took his flashlight out into the dark night to troll the underbrush looking for him. He bought a book about the destruction of Bucharest’s old neighborhoods during the reign of Ceaus¸escu and wept over the photos of buildings and streets he remembered from his boyhood that were no longer there. Looking at the pictures made him unhappy, but they also provided an excuse to stay in bed and sleep off unpleasant memories.

His only happiness came when he was planning his escape to Key West for January 1998, this time including a reunion with Aldo and Bianca. The holiday was everything his three friends could have hoped for in terms of seeing him cheer up, and indeed he did enjoy it. He mixed seemingly effortlessly with the local literary crowd at dinner parties and took pleasure in introducing his Italian friends to the locals. Ann Beattie gave several small dinners at which Steinberg held forth with monologues, almost but not quite as in days of old. What he enjoyed most was the pleasure he and his three companions took in each other’s company and how the warmth and relaxation they found in the colorful setting permeated their affection.

BACK IN NEW YORK, HE WAS IMMEDIATELY beset by lethargy and despair. Steinberg regretted that he had been so happy in Key West that he had not taken Aldo aside to give him the details of what he was now describing generically as his “illness.” He meant the term to include much more than the euphemism “melancholy” that he still substituted for depression. There were new problems with his teeth and continuing worries over the many visits to the doctors who supervised his still indolent thyroid cancer, and there was also a host of new aches and pains for which he consulted specialists. His neurologist recommended a physical therapist who visited regularly several times each week to put him through a routine of exercises. The main problem was that the antidepressants were not working, and he felt the need to see an analyst and begin therapy on a regular basis. He asked Prudence to help him find someone, and in early 1998 he began therapy with at least two or three analysts, none of whom he consulted for long.

Once again he was on the telephone, first to Aldo, until he realized how upsetting his unfocused ramblings were, then to Sandy Frazier in Montana. “Strange how the letters and telephone don’t mix,” he wrote. “Will I tell you the same things when I’ll talk to you? Will I worry?” Frazier was indeed worried, for Steinberg asked him to buy a gun, specifically a.38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver that he was familiar with from his time in the navy. Frazier tried to talk him out of it: “I took it as something crazy and said no, I wouldn’t do it. All I could think of was that he would shoot himself in New York City with a gun that was registered to me in Montana. I told him I thought it was a crazy thing to do.” Steinberg accepted Frazier’s refusal and dismissed the subject by saying he wished he were Swiss, because all Swiss men had to serve in the army and “everybody there has a bazooka under the bed.” Next he asked Prudence to buy him a gun, and she too refused. Shortly after, he decided that as nothing else was working, he would have electroshock therapy.

STEINBERG WAS “TIRED OF WAITING FOR SANITY TO RETURN,” an expression he had used many years earlier when he made his return pilgrimage to Tortoreto in search of he knew not what. He knew he had to do something drastic, because panic and anxiety left him frightened to the point of paralysis most of the time, and depending on where he was, he was afraid to leave his house or apartment. When he could not avoid being with people, he had to make a superhuman effort to pretend that everything was normal, and when others treated him as if everything was as it always had been, he was both upset and amazed that no one could sense his despair or realize how troubled he was. His night fears were overwhelming, so he took Ambien to help him sleep. Sometimes it made him wake up happy, but the feeling never lasted for long.

By early December 1998 he feared that his depression was intractable and that he could do nothing to cure it, either alone or with the help of doctors and psychiatrists. Dr. Jerome Groopman had just become a staff writer on medical subjects for The New Yorker; he recommended that Steinberg consult his psychiatrist brother, Dr. Leonard Groopman, who was the first to suggest that Steinberg might benefit from electroshock therapy. When Arne Glimcher learned of Dr. Leonard Groopman’s suggestion, he referred Steinberg to the psychiatrist Dr. Frank Miller, who agreed that it could be beneficial and then became the doctor who authorized the treatment. At first Steinberg dismissed the idea out of hand, but eventually he decided that he had no other option.

Prudence was so alarmed when he told her that he would have the treatment that she went to a medical bookstore and bought and read the only book in stock on the subject. The book’s introduction gave the history of all the past horrors of shock treatment, but the text described the latest progress, explaining how treatments were much shorter and more controlled than they had been and were surprisingly effective for curing depression in older people. She was unexpectedly reassured by what she read and felt it made her better equipped at Steinberg’s next appointment with Dr. Miller, to be “a less naive advocate, since Saul wasn’t the type to do research or grill doctors.”

The original plan was for Steinberg to have ten or twelve treatments, and originally he did not want anyone but Prudence to know. He changed his mind and told Aldo in a telephone call, but instead of calling Hedda directly, he asked Prudence to go to her house and tell her in person that she was not to worry. His internist, Dr. Tepler, and the psychiatrist, Dr. Miller, both told Steinberg that he would suffer a cumulative loss of short-term memory but would regain it entirely within six to eight weeks. Originally he was to go to the Payne Whitney clinic’s psychiatric facility, perhaps as an outpatient, but someone, Prudence remembered, probably one of his doctors, thought he would need greater privacy to be amenable to the treatment and he was admitted to the Greenberg Pavilion at New York–Presbyterian Hospital.

He was treated every other day from December 16 to December 24, 1998, and was discharged for a short break on Christmas Day. He began a second round of treatments as an outpatient on December 31 but was rehospitalized for further treatments every other day from January 4 to January 13, 1999. He was discharged again on January 15, and by that time, as Prudence remembered, “he was getting a little scrambled (not unpleasantly so) and they didn’t want to push him into flat-out incoherence, is how I recall their putting it.” She also remembered that Steinberg was “never not himself,” and although he did not see anyone but her during the treatment, she did not think any of his close friends would have been able to tell that anything untoward had happened to him.

Prudence was waiting when he was brought back to his room after the first treatment. She was terrified to go in despite hearing from the nurse that he was fine, but the moment she saw him, she was astonished at the change in his expression. “I didn’t know then the term ‘mask of depression,’ but it was simply gone. He fell immediately into easy banter and said he had to call Hedda immediately. And I knew just from the tender way he drew out Hed-da-a-a, as if it were the first word he’d ever learned to say and was savoring the syllables, that she would be instantly reassured. She told me later—I’m sure I would have gone there afterward so we could kvell together—that she hadn’t heard his voice sound like that in ten years.”

Almost immediately he felt so much better that he was able to joke. He was allowed day passes, and just before Prudence collected him to go to lunch in a nearby Turkish restaurant that he liked because the cuisine reminded him of Romania, the nurse took his temperature with a sonar instrument. Prudence had never seen one before and asked what she was measuring; without missing a beat, Saul replied, “Ego.” He joked that even with no memory he could still make a bon mot. Dr. Torsten Wiesel came to visit, and the ever-courteous Saul said, “This is Prudence, and this is”—forgetting Torsten’s name—“Virtue.”

Prudence assumed that because Saul was never bedridden, he had been hospitalized both as a safety precaution because of his age and to make sure he stuck with the treatment long enough for it to be effective. He liked to go for walks around the neighborhood, noticing with pleasure that his physical vitality had returned. He looked at the street scenes with such expectation, as if he were plotting new pictures, and he was so joyful that it gave her joy to see him that way. As his treatments wound down and because it was January and bitterly cold and snowy, Dr. Miller thought it would be a good idea for him to go somewhere where he could move around easily and consolidate the psychic and physical gains he had made. Prudence was surprised when Saul said he wanted to go to St. Bart’s, for he had not been back there since the time Sigrid had had such a serious breakdown that she had to be airlifted back to New York under heavy sedation. She could only guess that he might be testing himself to see if he really had overcome the many emotions connected with Sigrid’s suicide, but he may also have chosen St. Bart’s because “it was warm, he knew the hotel and could predict the kind of anonymity he would enjoy. And maybe they’d been happy there the time before [her breakdown].” Just before they left, he wrote to Henri Cartier-Bresson, telling him that he thought he would never recover from Sigrid’s death but (without mentioning the electroshock treatments) that he was slowly and timidly coming back to life. As he reread what he had written to his old friend, he was convinced that the worst was over.

THEY LEFT FOR ST. BART’S ON MARCH 7, and Steinberg was happy to be back in the same hotel in the same rooms, sitting on the same balcony and looking out at the beach. He sent Sandy Frazier a postcard praising the weather’s “many degrees of perfection” and told him how much he was enjoying reading Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex. He particularly relished that she was seventy and Essex thirty-four when she had him decapitated. He was also reading G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England, pleased with and sharing Trevelyan’s liberal political interpretations.

They were there a week when the effects of the electroshock therapy began to wear off. He began to make notations about himself in his datebook on the day they arrived, and on the day after, March 8, he wrote, “Lost memory of part of life made of quarrel [sic] tears, pacify, forgive, no speak. Then again offense, etc.” After that, his daily notations were about how his moods varied; how pleasure came from glancing through Prudence’s copy of Moby Dick and rereading Solzhenitsyn, taking long walks on the beach, and enjoying the local food, but how easily pleasure was replaced by concern. He was carefully calculating his worrisome weight loss in both pounds and kilos and calling Hedda every day, more because he needed her to reassure him that he would stay well than because he simply wanted to talk to her. At the end of March, he was back in New York and summed up the vacation as leaving him “tired and disappointed.”

As April began he made a careful note in his datebook about the times and quantities of the medications Ritalin, Dexedrine, and Adderall that he was supposed to take each day but did not. At the same time, Dr. Miller’s office was telephoning to implore him to schedule a follow‑up appointment and he was stalling. On April 11, Dr. Miller sent a letter urging him to come to the office for an evaluation: “It is my opinion based on twenty-seven years of work that you will relapse within the year if you do not have either outpatient ECT or attempt to reintroduce an antidepressant.” Dr. Miller put the risk of relapse within the year at 65 percent and within eighteen months at 85 percent, saying, “Obviously, this is a serious but avoidable prognosis. You may not appreciate fully the work and effort that went into your diagnosis and I don’t want it wasted.”

Still Steinberg did nothing. He blamed his increasing lethargy on his loss of appetite and the steady weight loss that resulted. During the last week of April 1999 he had lost so much weight that he consulted his internist, Dr. Tepler, who had him check into the hospital for several days of tests beginning on April 28. Prudence Crowther was at work on April 30, when Steinberg telephoned to say he was putting Dr. Tepler on the line. Dr. Tepler told her that Saul Steinberg had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and there was nothing to be done.

“And then I went to the hospital,” Prudence recalled. “I don’t know if Saul ever actually told anyone else, including Hedda.” Although there was the possibility that one of his doctors told Hedda at an appropriate moment that the disease was fatal, Prudence thought it more likely that “maybe we just figured she’d realize soon enough what was happening.”

CHAPTER 47

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